Edit October 16: We’ve been monitoring this over the past few weeks and it seems official that free Google clicks is officially a thing of the past. It looks to have stopped around September 29th, and over the past 2+ weeks it has been completely gone for each of our hundreds of merchants.

Edit August 16: It looks like the death of free Google traffic has been greatly exaggerated. We are seeing free traffic pop up again as of August 14, so from August 10-13 it was gone.

If you’re a Breaking Bad fan you’ve probably heard the tagline “All Bad Things Must Come to an End” countless times over the past few months.

But as it turns out good things have an expiration date as well, namely the free Google Shopping traffic merchants have come to love over the past 11 years since Google Shopping (then called Froogle) was launched.

A check of a handful of our clients’ merchant center accounts paints a picture similar to the one below, where on August 10th the amount of free clicks which had been steadily dropping finally went the way of one of Walter’s nemesis’ and is seemingly dead:

This had been promised to happen over a year ago but seems to just now be taking fruition.

Given the unpredictability of Google though, it’s entirely possible to see free clicks spring up again later this week–but we would be shocked if that were to happen–as Google, like Walter White are in the empire business and don’t have a terrible amount of incentives to give out freebies.

Let us know if your merchant center experience is the same and/or your predictions for this final season.

About the AuthorTien Nguyen is a co-founder of CPC Strategy and deals with data feeds in his waking hours and often in his sleep. He spends his free time with Rubik's cubes while rooting for the underachieving Raiders and UCLA sports teams where he graduated with a mathematics/economics degree. See all posts by this author here.